


Victory, such as it is

by BrightestSun



Series: Au Yea August [14]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: AU Yeah AUgust (Miraculous Ladybug), Angst, But at what cost?, Existentialism, F/M, Gabriel wins, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-08-14
Packaged: 2019-06-27 10:26:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15683562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrightestSun/pseuds/BrightestSun
Summary: Hawkmoth wins, his wish will be granted, but there's a price to be paid. Is he willing and able to pay it?Perhaps Gabriel should have read more fairy tales, he'd know to be careful what you wish for.AU Yea August - Reincarnation





	Victory, such as it is

Everything comes at a price. Fashion empires are built upon the broken backs of the ambitious failures who paved the way for men and women, willing to exploit their passion and naiveté.

Life is but a series of choices and the choice will always take the same form, eat, or be eaten. They who dared live lives in which they prided themselves on enslaving those around them, using and abusing them, consuming their spirits, could hope for only three ends. To die, knowing that they won a game of their own creation, and left only misery in their wake, to die at the hands of either those they had sought to ensnare, or to a bigger fish, intent on pushing a rival from their perch, worst and perhaps most common, was for such a person to look behind them and see the blood which soaked their every step, the death they had left in their wake, and the consequence of their actions, for such a person, there could be only the sensation of the barrel of a gun between their teeth, to end the misery.

I’ve spent years looking back with nothing but regret and longing to change the hand of fate, to take destiny by the scruff and force her to deal me a new hand. Now I stand at the precipice, the tiny jewels in my hands, light and tiny, and the weight of them never able to live up to their own significance.

My thoughts went to the defeated, spiteful and horrified look on my sons face as his transformation ended, souring my victory and forcing me dangerously close to remembering the blood under my own boots.

It was for the best, my son’s hatred for me is justified. More than that, I hoped that this was my legacy, of spite and contempt. I prayed for a moment, holding the Miraculouses to my chest and hoping that this would be my legacy, that no one would ever look back on my life with love or longing, that no one would miss me the way I had missed my beloved. That no one be destroyed like I had been, because of me.

I slid off my wedding band, allowing it to gain freedom from me for the first time in 25 years. A simple ring of gold, a mockery of the union which was always meant to be eternal. Without its partner, it was nothing but a reminder of a yesterday which refused to leave me, which kept me up at every moonlit night, which had me hearing the final gasps of an angel whom I’d foolishly thought to capture.

Adrien was the dark-clad hero, while under my watch he had become one of my most fearsome opponents, he had been a source of near-endless frustration, he had stood against me for years. Looking back at the man he had become, my heart swelled with pride and relief, that my wickedness had not seemed to spread to him, that he had grown to be nothing short of a great man. I didn’t deserve him but was I perhaps allowed to believe for a moment, that the world would not break my son as it had broken me.

I held the wedding ring in my palm, it felt so light and so innocent. Throwing it away like a discarded memory was impossible, but I did not deserve its memory. How could I hold onto the past, when my present self had been emptied of any love and any good which could have ever existed within the tar-black walls of my being.

I was lead to corruption, and I never stood a chance. Some men come into the world broken and empty, and I had been a fool to believe for even a moment that I could live a life in the light of the radiant maiden and the son who through sheer luck took after her. His goodness was a constant reminder of how broken I truly am, and his eyes, filled with sadness, seem to be the only gaze fit for my being.

I allowed myself a moment of hope before finally allowing the ring to fall onto the ground. It rang out in a sweet, hollow glasslike tone as it hit the stone beneath. It drew my breath and I was forced to hold myself back to not dive for it, not take it, hug it and apologize. But today was not about the past, for the first time since the day of her death, a moment in my life was about the present.

The ring, a monument to destruction, it slid onto my finger, taking the place of the wedding ring. How fitting that entropy and decay would replace hope and happiness. All things end, and life is but a cycle of birth and destruction.

I felt a moment's pain as I stabbed the studs through my flesh. Perhaps fitting that the red jewels should be soaked in the blood of my labor. The studs represented creation, and what is creation but blood and pain? Of course, I would have rather suffered a hundred or a million times worse, if it would have meant feeling satisfied with my victory, instead of simply hollow purpose.

The trio of beings stood before me suddenly, as small as rats and so marvelously incapable of living up to their own magnificence. As I stood in the presence of the gods, all I could think was whether this was all they were, trembling, angry little servants.

As the kwami of creation opened its mouth to speak I held out my hand. I was not here to listen to their groveling, their anger or their warnings. They were here to listen, and they would do nothing else.

I looked at them with purpose, having waited in stasis since her death for this moment. “Bring me back to her. Bring me back to a time before all this, where she is alive. Bring back my angel Emilie, I command you”

The creatures looked at one another for a moment, the small cat looking up with contempt “nothing is free. For creation, there has to be destruction.”

The texts had been vague, but there was no surprise. A part of me had hoped that we could live as a family, the three of us. However, life was a series of choices and sacrifices. And it was better to live happily as two, than to continue this life of static nothingness and emptiness. For an angel to rise upon the earth again, any price was worth it.

I smiled in spite of myself, was a sadistic part of me so far gone into bile and evil that I enjoyed the poetry of sacrificing life for life? Or was the prospect of the two, alone together, actually happy, the thing which I’d desired all this time? Had I hoped for the sacrifice to be true, so that the strong family could be whole again, without the parasitic third that had destroyed it in the first place?

“Then, as a sacrifice, I offer myself” the three creatures gasped with surprise, their childish naiveté almost brought laughter forth from me. “I am poison, poison which seeps into the lives around me. For an angel to live, the devil shall offer his life in return. Do it! Reshuffle the hand of fate and make the world right! Make a world where she lived, and I died!”

The Kwami floated with expressions of sadness and regret as they began glowing with a light that engulfed everything.

I was swallowed by the light, which shone through my being like radiant fire and ice which burned at my flesh, exposing my very soul. For a moment I could feel it, my very being without body, only a black corrupted mass of oil and hatred. My very soul, a reflection of my eldritch pursuits.

As I burned, I felt nothing but pain and relief. Then, only nothingness.

There can be nothing but a disappointing beginning after such an ending, but somehow life kept marching onwards. I found myself floating in darkness, purple nothingness surrounding me on all sides. Was this death? Or simply the punishment for my hubris, a personal chamber for my lonely thoughts, a place for me to tear myself apart for all of eternity. Yet, it gave me hope that it had worked.

I felt a sudden pressure around my body, the sensation of warmth, like the warmth of the morning sun. The darkness slowly vanished as light formed around me and I found myself in the last place I expected, but the first place I would have chosen if given the chance.

My heart seemed to stop as I looked into the eyes of my angel. She looked down on me with her perfection, she was as beautiful and radiant as ever. Though a bit older than last I’d seen her, did I dare to hope that the woman before me was actually a sign that I had gotten everything I’d ever dreamed?

In all of the stories I’d read, there seemed to be just as many stories where the hero was asked to make an impossible sacrifice, only to learn that it was a test to see if he was truly deserving of his price. Had I inadvertently passed the ultimate test? Could I dare to dream that I could have it all?

“What’s your name?” Emilie’s voice send shivers of happiness through my joyful being, but the words confused me, had she forgotten about me? If she had, then could she grow to know me again?

I wanted to study this new world from afar, to see what had happened, to find my voice before I was forced to face her. Yet I needed to answer her, to figure it out as I went, all I could do was talk to her, then get my answers later.

“My name is Duusu” my voice was alien to me, and my words more so. My voice seemed light, birdlike and strangely feminine. I held my mouth and found that my hand was replaced with a blue, featureless flipper. As I looked at Emilie it slowly dawned on me that somehow, I stood before her as a kwami. Ice began forming in my stomach as my mind raced to try and catch up.

“Duusu” Emilie stated factually, the radiant kind eyes from my memory, lost in the quiet no-nonsense frown before her. “Tell me, is it true that with the powers of the kwami of creation and destruction, I can change the course of fate entirely.”

My eyes widened, I wanted to tell her, no, to scream in protest, but while my body seemed to respond to my wishes, my words refused to come out the way I wanted “Yes.” I wrested control of my words finally “but! Doing so would come at a terrible price! You can not-“

“- quiet” Emilie ordered, her voice harsh with anger and bitterness. “I want answers, not advice. You will speak only when spoken to, and you will do as I say!”

Looking up at her piercing eyes I could see no sympathy, none of the love I remembered from her. Worse still, the words echoed through me with horrifying familiarity. I remembered the first conversation I’d had with Nooroo, my own miraculous. Word for word, it was the same, tears began forming in my eyes with bitter realization.

Emilie scoffed at my tears, she ignored me, turning from me and opening a locket, I could see misery in her longing expression. The eyes of a woman who had lost everything shone through her, breaking my heart in a way that I had never experienced before. I choked up, seeing the painting on the wall behind her, Emilie standing in front of Adrien, the boy’s professional expression exactly the same as I remembered. I looked at the eyes of my son, seeing the same sadness and pain as always.

“Duusu, let us begin, we have much to do.”

I wanted to scream in protest, to tell her everything, but some force caught every word in my throat. I looked up at her, hoping the sadness and regret on my face would be enough to give her pause, but her eyes shone with nothing but purpose, devoid of empathy or love. I could only allow the tears to fall as I nodded to her with the beginning realization of the hell in which I now lived.

 

**Author's Note:**

> it's rare for me to write something so purely angsty. But after a bunch of fluff this month I had to get something else out of my system.  
> Hope this story made your flesh crawl, ykno, in a nice way.


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